


Meta Has Its Privileges: "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose"

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, x-files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-20 16:29:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1517390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nonfiction. In which I talk about "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" as metafiction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meta Has Its Privileges: "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose"

 

 

You know, one of the great things about rewatching is that in the first few years you get to see the show getting better. Temporarily, that blocks out your memories of all the years at the end there when it was getting worse.

The season2/3 cliffhanger sequence (“Anasazi,” “Blessing Way,” and “Paper Clip”) is probably the best Chris Carter ever did with the story arc—though at the cost of endorsing and replicating many, many, MANY cliches about Native Americans, something I hope to address in a separate post at some point. And a little further on in Season 3 we have what may be the best non-arc single episode the show ever made. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” discovers the optimal combination of humor, pathos, weirdness, and horror. But beyond that, it is a—from my point of view—refreshing and ever more relevant commentary not only on the age-old debate about predestination vs. free will, but about some of the conventions that are beginning to solidify as, in the wake of  _Silence of the Lambs,_ the serial-killer genre starts to emerge. And related to that, there’s also a story being told here about narrative, power, and metafiction.

In CBFR, Mulder and Scully are part of an FBI team working to stop a serial killer who targets prognosticators—people who claim to be able to predict the future. We know who the killer is long before they do; and so in a way does Clyde Bruckman, an aging insurance salesman who has a life-changing but very specific psychic power: he can predict when and how a given person will die. He also seems to have some sort of psychic connection to the killer, who also believes that he can see the future (though, and this is something we will return to later, his psychic ‘visions’ primarily predict his own future behavior). Bruckman discovers one of the victims’ bodies, and reveals so much knowledge of the crime that Mulder comes to believe he’s the real deal. Bruckman reluctantly joins the investigative team. The narrow range of his psychic abilities proves frustrating to them; but both of them bond with the prickly and quietly despondent Bruckman, whose ‘gift’ has gradually drained most of the joy out of his life. During a standoff in a hotel kitchen, Scully shoots the killer to save Mulder from him. They later find Bruckman in his apartment, having committed suicide. 

What makes this episode pure gold is the way it combines a wonderful story about characters and relationships with intertexuality, self-parody, and metacommentary. The characterization of Mulder and Scully is now set enough that the show can start making jokes about it; this begins early on, in the scene in which Mulder and Scully first join the FBI team. Before they arrive, one of the other agents is describing someone they’ve called in who’s “spooky” and, you know, he’s weird but he gets results, yada yada; the initiated viewer knows this can be no other than Mulder; but in fact they’re talking about a professional psychic called The Stupendous Yappi, who comes in and does a hilarious performance at the crime scene. Every moment of this scene contains some kind of joke about Mulder and Scully and their skeptic/believer dynamic, the main joke being that Yappi is so outrageous that even Mulder knows he’s a fake. During a scene where Mulder is testing Bruckman’s psychic abilities, Bruckman incorrectly identifies a scrap of fabric as having been torn from Mulder’s Knicks T-shirt—recalling another role-reversal episode from Season One, “Beyond the Sea,” in which Mulder uses a piece of his Knicks T-shirt to (as he thinks) debunk a death-row inmate who’s claiming psychic ability. 

Mulder calls this a ‘miss;’ but in fact Bruckman’s identification of that T-shirt is just one of many indications that Bruckman may have meta privileges. Kids on the Interwebs today use the term “meta” to refer to any kind of commentary or analysis of the show in question. I, back in the day, used the term “meta privileges” to refer to a character’s ability to be aware of his fictionality and to perceive the fact that his life is in fact a script created by a writer. Bruckman’s identification of the scrap of fabric as part of Mulder’s Knicks T-shirt—and it looks as if they are literally using the same prop—suggests a knowledge of the first season of the show that his character couldn’t possibly have. From that POV the limitations of his psychic ability become more interesting as a commentary on the writing process. Bruckman knows all about endings—he knows how all the characters are going to die—and he seems to have special insight into character motivations. This is typically what you start with—what I start with, anyway—when you’re writing a new story: characters, motives, and an endpoint. The hard part is working out how you get from the beginning to the end. It’s when you’re working out the middle steps that the story is most likely to get away from you and things are most likely to happen that you never predicted and which change the narrative—even if you wind up at the endpoint you originally planned. Poor Bruckman—like all of us, at times—doesn’t know enough about the ‘middle’ part of the story to be any use to Mulder and Scully, or (and I LOVE this detail) to make money off his ‘gift.’ Bruckman plays the lottery daily and always loses. As someone who has never made a dime off any of my fiction, I sympathize.

My favorite thing about this reading of Bruckman’s ‘gift’ is what it does for the confrontation between him and the killer toward the end of the episode. The killer has been tormented throughout by not knowing why he does the things he does; and like Bruckman he thinks about it in writerly terms. In his conversation with the first victim we see him go after—a fortuneteller who’s reading his palm—he says that what bothers him about his visions of the future is not just that these things he sees himself doing are evil, but they are “out of character,” and in fact SO awful that it’s hard to believe that  _anyone_  would ever do them. When he finally meets Bruckman, he asks him the question he’s been killing to find the answer to: why do I kill people? Bruckman says, “Don’t you get it? You kill people because you’re a homicidal maniac.”

Behold, ladies and gentlemen, the primary cause of my frustration with the entire serial killer genre: what it does to the idea of ‘motive.’ Serial killer narratives pander to our desire to discover patterns in apparently random events—a desire Scully explicitly points out to Mulder when they find the first crime scene that Bruckman envisioned. The resolution to a serial killer narrative typically turns on the detective’s discovering the pattern and using it to predict the killer’s next move. This part of the plotting can be done well or done badly; but no matter how cleverly it’s handled, the bottom line is that at the end of the day all serial killers have the same motivation. The detective will often come up with a profile ‘explaining’ the killer’s behavior—childhood abuse is the big one, but perhaps some other traumatic event, or a resentment of women having to do with his mother or some other close female relative—but they all basically boil down to “the killer kills because something turned him into a killer.” Bruckman’s ‘explanation’ is so tautological it’s nonsensical—of course homicidal maniacs kill people, that’s the definition of a homicidal maniac—but the fact that the killer is enormously pleased with Bruckman’s ‘answer’ is another dig at serial-killer plots and their logic. What Bruckman gives him is the only explanation that most serial-killer narratives ever offer about *why* the killer does what he does. It makes perfect sense that a serial killer who maybe is vaguely aware that he’s a character in a serial-killer story would accept it. If we find it insufficient, well, maybe that’s a sign that we should demand a little more from our fictions.

Even more intriguing, from that POV, is that this episode suggests that Scully, though she doesn’t exactly have meta privileges, is in some way ‘beyond’ the narrative in that she is not controlled by it or entirely bound by its laws. When she finally bites and asks Bruckman how she’s going to die, he responds, “You don’t.” This is never explained; but of course on a show about the paranormal there are all kinds of ways we could take it. Indeed, in the season 5 episode “Bad Blood,” it is kind of strongly implied that Scully may have become a vampire. But anyway, Bruckman’s pronouncement that Scully will be the exception to the one rule that all mortal beings are compelled to follow is another indication of his awareness of their fictionality. As long as the show is on the air, Scully won’t die—indeed, she  _can’t_  die, since she is one of the stars. Interestingly, Bruckman seems to find Mulder more expendable; and the history of the show actually bore this out, since Anderson continued after Duchovny left the show. 

But Scully is also granted the ability to change the narrative from within. Bruckman has a vision early on of Mulder getting attacked from behind in a hotel kitchen by the killer, who’s carrying a knife. In the vision, Mulder gets his throat cut. Playing out a common ‘fate’ plot scenario discussed earlier by Scully and Bruckman over cards, Mulder’s foreknowledge of these events serves only to fuck him up worse: because he expects the killer to be behind him at the moment when he steps on the pie, he turns around—thus turning his back on the killer, who was in fact in front of him. Getting jumped from behind is an action cliche which has already become an X-Files cliche. The killer comments that “that’s not what’s supposed to happen,” but Mulder is still pretty much on his way to being dead until Scully bursts in and blows the killer away. Scully later says that she stumbled upon Mulder by accident—this episode is full of coincidences, and characteristically the characters discuss them and how ‘contrived’ they seem—but all the same, the message you get from that sequence is: Scully doesn’t have to play by your stinking script.

So the most interesting part of the whole fate-vs-free-will thing in this episode, for me, is the question of how much control Bruckman, as the stand-in for the hapless writer of perhaps limited talent, actually has over the outcomes he predicts. His general despair derives from the fact that he can’t seem to change any of the stories he wants to change. He can’t save his neighbor, for instance, from being eaten by her own dog after dying alone in her apartment, even though he tries. But, like the killer, Bruckman does on one occasion predict his own behavior. He tells Scully that they will wind up “in bed together;” he then explains that he doesn’t mean it sexually. He describes the scene in detail—her holding his hand, looking at him with compassion, while tears stream down her face. And at the end of the episode, Scully and Mulder do find him dead on his couch. He’s taken, apparently, a bunch of sleeping pills, then put a clear plastic bag over his head to suffocate himself. The condensation that’s built up on the inside of the bag produces the ‘tears’ that Bruckman predicted. This seems to be an instance in which Bruckman took control of the script and achieved an effect he wanted to achieve. Alas that it cost him his death.

All of that is interesting—to me, anyway—but what really makes this episode beautiful is the relationship that unfolds between Scully and Bruckman—two highly defended, prickly people who have both seen and lived through way more death and trauma than is good for anyone. Bruckman obviously notes and appreciates the fact that she’s a hot young woman; but as the ‘in bed together’ discussion indicates, his real connection with her is more spiritual and emotional, even dare I say psychic. The layers and layers of meta are built around this story of genuine human connection; and that’s why this episode is not only interesting but lovable. This is something that, say, Moffat and Gatiss could learn from for  _Sherlock._


End file.
